Church’s Chicken is an American chain of fast food restaurants specializing in fried chicken. The chain was founded as Church’s Fried Chicken To Go in 1952 in San Antonio, Texas. The company has more than 1,700 locations in 24 countries and is the fourth largest chicken restaurant chain.

The organization’s intranet, called Team Church’s, was originally a bare-bones, outdated form of Microsoft Sharepoint. With a lackluster platform of engagement, the managers of the platform were unable to retain the confidence of their end users ensuring that content was up-to-date and accurate.

Adoption of the platform was dropping. The pitfalls of not having a platform that was visually appealing and consistent with the brand drew users away from the platform. The team experienced navigation issues and realized the need for a new resource and communication solution to engage their end users was critical to their internal success.

The team at Church’s Chicken understood that in order to be successful they needed to start with a strategy and prioritize what they wanted to accomplish with a new intranet. This started with defining a vision to clarify the purpose of the project and inspire the team to be unified with an agreed upon plan. They also surveyed their end users to identify what wasn’t working and what would be most important to them for the final product. From the survey, they identified reoccurring features that would be most important to the success of the project such as searchability, user-friendly, self-service, visually appealing, accessibility, relevant content, and mobile-friendly.

Understanding that change can be hard for users, especially on such a large scale, they felt it was important not to reinvent the wheel from what they were doing. This translated into investing in revitalizing the system that was already in place. Microsoft Office 365 provided a solid foundation that was already familiar to end users.

The team identified Akumina as the solution to attain their goals and fulfill the requirements of this new intranet platform. Additionally, they realized the value the platform provided in terms of maintaining the environment with a limited amount of resources to support their intranet. The Akumina platform also enabled Team Church’s to expand their audience beyond the corporate employees to domestic and international franchisees, franchisee restaurant leadership, franchise restaurants, and corporate restaurants.

The final solution was a new, modern intranet platform that features Team Church’s branding including bold colors, logos, photos, and font. The team also focused on organizing content with a well-executed user experience for staff and employees to easily get to the information most relevant to them.

End users feel engaged with the ability to interact with one another through Church’s Chatter and have a stronger sense of belonging to the brand. The new Team Church’s has been more efficient and user-friendly increasing productivity and improving employee satisfaction. The new team church’s offers enhanced communication and are easily accessible to all users and on any device.